WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

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The2nd ammendment, it makes all the others possible. <///<

Guys, I am a pagan (Brian, thats a 'heathen' to you ), and I would not want my observations to be used in defence of either side of the coin in your political system.

The trouble is that, as a young country, you are not allowing yourselves to evolve and adapt to your problems because the consitution is being interperated, abused, and misread by every group with a voice.

I would go further, and suggest that, globally, the constitution is nowhere near as big a creation as 'Windows'. Now, when Microsoft created windows, they didnt have the arrogance to assert that it could not be improved upon. They were proud of it, but did not make it untouchable, rather, they encouraged people to tell them its weakspots, and responded to feedback to improve it and keep it up to the task of dealing with modern requirements.

The constitution is not a religious script (and dont even get me started on those ), it is the result of a few powerful men's board meeting, and as such, is not perfect.

In Britain we have had Henry's split from Rome, Cromwell's New Model Army, a second, completely different Monarchy, an industrial revolution, and emancipation of the lower classes, and plenty in between.

In that time laws, and rights, and policies have changed beyond recognition.

Did you know, that still on the statutes, from feudal times, it is (technically) legal to shoot a welshman by longbow, if found within the City walls of Chester after dark?

Thats crazy right? But that law was pefectly reasonable for the time it was written.

If you dont allow for laws to evolve for the society they cater for, then they become irrelevant, and they get ignored, and society becomes more accepting, and complicit, in, the breaking of the laws of the land.

Now my point as it relates to the US, is that right now, 'Democracy' involves voting for one of two parties, based on either a)personality of the salesman or b)which you disagree with the least. Thats freedom?

Also, the fervour with which you all put your store in the potential new captains is hilarious, they are just new operators of the same system, and they have their hands tied by the rules they inherit, making either side incapable of doing what is needed to fix the errors.

Britain is no better, but its worth noting that we have had several more re-boots and operating system upgrades than you, and still havent got it right, so what chance have you got running on your beta programme?

Man, you know I love you like a brother, but I definitley disagree with some of the points here.

I don't think it's useful for the right to point out anything about Rahm Emmanuel. Is he slimy? Probably. But the left can just as easily point at D1ck Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. Probably best not to point fingers, as we'll all end up pointing at each other.

I do find it ironic that the far-right is ready to call quits on the current administration after less than 3 months (!!!), when we were implored to give time and more time to the policies of the last one.

I also find it somewhat hypocritical of the far-right to get so orthodox about the constitution, when *they* have tried to make MANY changes to it themselves. Remember flag-burning? Gay marriage? Abortion? Etc. Can't have it both ways, bro.

Time to come together as a country, and stop all the whining.

_________________________"In case you ever wondered what it's like to be knocked out, it's like waking up from a nightmare only to discover it wasn't a dream." -Forrest Griffin

I bought 2 chuck norris shirts today, one has a picture of a cheesegrater and says chuck norris toilet paper below it.The other one has a picture of chuck norris and below it just says "go [censored] yourself"